


and a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I

by Ias



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Drowning, Gen, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4520352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He would never again return to his golden bed, but was stretched cold as stone, twisted upon the floor of the shallows. There for ages his huge bones could be seen in calm weather among the ruined piles of the old town. But few dared to cross that cursed spot, and none dared to dive into the shivering water or recover the precious stones that fell from his rotting carcase.” </p><p>Bard dreams of it still. Not of fire, and falling, but of water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I

The Lake at night is still, dark, and dead.

There are fish that move within its water, ancient but not wise, and never at peace. Their gills twitch and pulse far beneath the surface, unceasing, and Bard feels his skin prickle with the motions like an echo. He’s caught a fish like that before, watched it heave and writhe on the deck of his barge as the weight of its body betrayed it. He had wondered what they ate. He fed it to his family. Now, he imagines its descendants are still working to pick clean the carcass that lays on the lakebed beneath them. He would never eat of their meat, not now.  

He dreams of it still. Not of fire, and falling, but of water. Of the sudden shock of hitting the surface, and his son’s body nearby (but not close enough, he was lost, he was drowning,  _where was Bain_ ); but mostly of the dragon. He was sinking down into the depths, and Smaug was sinking with him, a single golden eye drawing nearer and nearer as they reached the bottom, so close it swallows him whole.

In the end, there’s no choice in the matter—something keeps bringing him back. Something that seizes him when his eyes stray out beyond the gentle spring-green hills of Dale, down to the smooth surface of the Lake beyond. Bard can feel it catching in his chest, like the plucking of a string. Is that a haze of smoke over the water? No, only a late-morning mist. The sudden swell of terror ebbs, or perhaps he merely chokes it down. There’s nothing there, he tells himself. Nothing there but bones.

But the feeling is there, itching in his fingertips and tugging insistently on the cords of his throat. He knows then that that he has to go. He just has to be _sure_.

He takes the boat out alone. He knows exactly where he’s going. Even in the summer, the Lake is cold enough to tear the breath from your lungs and strangle the strength from your limbs. To dip beneath the water is to risk death, and not only from the cold. There are other things in the water than fish.

He leans over the edge of his boat. This is the place. He knows it in his heart, in the tremble of his hands. He leans over, and stares into the dark, choppy water. The mist opens around him, cupping him like a pair of hands ready to clamp shut. Above him, grey wisps of cloud brush over the surface of the moon. The light turns the surface of the water silver, but beneath he knows the water is dark. It is not deep here. If he leans a little closer, he can see a faint gleam near the bottom.

The clouds part, and Bard’s breath freezes in his chest. There it is. The remains of Laketown have long since rotted into the mud, but in the cold moonlight he can see the massive curve of a rib bone arching up from the bottom of the lakebed. The bones rise like pale totems out of the muck, waiting in the cold silence of the water. Around them is the cold gleam of gold and rotting scale, strewn around the bones like offerings. Some say they will be there forever, that even when they sink far beneath the silt and mud of the lake they will endure.

Bard can see the curve of a fang, the rapturous curve of the neck thrown back in the throes of death. Perhaps he imagines it, but he thinks he can see the darker gleam of metal nestled inside the ribcage, right where the heart would have been. He can still feel the arrow under his fingertips, feels the scar its fletching left when it went flying from his hand. He can still remember what it was like look down Death’s wide, hungry throat. He can’t even imagine doing it once—the memories don’t seem like his own. He knows he could never do it again. He has to remind himself that he will never have to.

The water is so clear, so clear it’s hardly even there—Bard is suspended over what’s left of the creature, silent, still, never to move again. It seems as if there is nothing between them, as if the thread supporting him will snap and he will fall straight through nothing to the bottom of the Lake. Smaug is dead. Bard knows this, he always knows it—but there’s a part of him that can never seem to believe it. A part of him that never came staggering on the shore of the lake, a part of him that sank down into the dark water and never came back again. Sometimes when he wakes up in the middle of the night it’s with lake water spluttering and choking from behind his lips. Sometimes when he opens his eyes, he’s staring up at the surface from somewhere far, far below, and he’s not alone.

He can’t tear his eyes away from those shapes beneath the water. Bard wonders what he will do, when the mud finally opens up to receive the last of those pale shapes, when he looks down through those pale waters and sees nothing but lakebed. He thinks he might sink down and claw through the muck with his bare hands, until he settles on the smooth surface of a brandished rib. He’s not sure when his hands started shaking.  _It’s over. It’s all over._

The moon dips behind the clouds once again. At once, everything grows very dark.

The water ripples.

The terror that seizes Bard’s heart is a living thing, flesh and blood that tears into him and takes control and sets his shaking hands fumbling to take his boat far from here, but not fast enough, never fast enough, the flames were almost upon him—and by the time he gets control of his breathing, before he tells himself that it was nothing more than a fish drawn to the surface, he’s far away, he’s heading home. To safety.

He doesn’t turn around. He knows what he will see if he does: still, flat water, disturbed only by the probing of a fish nuzzling at the roof of the water. His mind tells a different story. Bard can see it, he can see the water stirring, dragging with the weight of some massive body beneath the waves, and if the rotting spikes of a long curved neck rear over the surface, if he can smell the rot and the smoke and the burning flesh, if he can hear the dry rattle of laughter—well. The water’s surface is smooth. The bones lie where they fell, where they will lie until the end of time.

 


End file.
